


All My Friends

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: Deus Ex: Invisible War
Genre: 5 Times, Angry Sex, F/F, It's a Sad, Minor Character Suicide (Mentioned), Post canon, Quickies, a mess of technicalities regarding that huh, apocalypse misery, helios ending, the problems with being A Denton, the role of resistance in dystopian hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-23 00:57:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15594696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: The five times they kissed, and the one time they didn't.





	All My Friends

**Author's Note:**

> this is not technically shor tbut i put it in this series anyway because if i had my way id have spent months editing this and that is not the point of Project Moonpie the point is to do more things more often so
> 
> i call upon the spirits of the greasels to come an eat away all the typos

1 | Trier

The first time Alex and Lin-May kiss, Alex’s fingers are jammed so deep inside her, she’s honestly worried she’ll forget how to breathe.

_They lied to me!_ she’d said.

_Bitch, me too,_ Alex said. _Let’s get drinks._

One moment they’d been finishing off weak zymve shots, the next moment Alex had Lin-May shoved up against a wall in some dark back room, and Lin-May had her arms wrapped around Alex’s waist, and they’d been rocking and panting and-

Forgetting how to breathe.

And god, does it hurt, but god does it feel good.

It’s only once Lin-May gasps, tenses, and cums all over Alex’s hand that Alex kisses her, roughly. There is nothing gentle about it. Nothing soft. Not a careful, light thing, no slow touches, no embrace.

But nothing hard or mean, either. No teeth, no aching, not even when Lin-May digs her nails into Alex’s back so tightly she’s certain she must be damaging the Tarsus uniform.

Angry, Lin-May will later understand.

_They lied to me._

 

2| Cairo

The second time they kiss, Alex is blazing through an alley with something dark and fatal in her eyes, something light and even more fatal in her hands. Lin-May falters mid-sentence, and Alex falters mid-step. She turns her head, and sees Lin-May down the cross-street, surrounded by soon-to-be-ex-Order members.

Alex sheathes the gun.

Not the bitter smile, though.

_Still with the church?_ Alex comments dispassionately. _I see you’re wearing your vestments._

In the background, the recording of Nicolette chants _vitakka, vitakka._

Not for the first time that day Lin-May crosses her arms and tugs unconsciously at the edge of her sleeve.

_I would have picked up some slacks and a neck sweater if the Templars hadn’t overrun the Arcology._

_Oh,_ Alex says. _Oh._

Lin-May tries to explain about the WTO and the Order’s plans, tries to warn Alex about the Illuminati, and Alex tries to pay attention, to understand.

She’s somewhere else though.

Lin-May doesn’t find out where for another five hours, when Alex trudges back, a pair of grey pants and a folded white labcoat with a high collar and three large buttons along the right side collarbone.

_Still a uniform though,_ Alex says, _just for a different team._

Alex traces a long line alongside Lin-May's spine as she undresses her, and for the moment, Lin-May couldn’t care less about which side they're discarding.

 

3| Helios

The world is one way, and then it is another.

Lin-May has one melded moment where she’s forcefully connected to every point of torture in the world, every feeling of pain and of misery and hell. She has one moment where she's slightly dizzy, and she has one moment where she’s seizing on the floor.

She’s dying. She knows she’s dying. She’s burning alive from the inside out and all she can do is scream.

The world doesn’t melt. It cartwheels from one nightmare to another with no pattern to the way it turns. The only structure is the constant feeling of bright blue pain. The only self remaining is the part of her that would rather be dead.

The body that used to be her is crying, sobbing, whimpering constantly and there is little that anyone can do about it.

Less that anyone _wants_ to do about it.

They’re not built for that specific kind of empathy anymore.

She’s someone’s curiosity, someone else’s statistic, she’s a dozen things but dead in the short eternity before what’s left of her world begins fading away.

She’s a dozen things like _grateful_ until there’s the faintest sense of pressure on some odd, connected anchorpoint in the chaos, a sense of pressure on a point that she once would have called a shoulder.

The pressure brings with something like...a chill.

A cold, radiating core that distills through her remaining self.

Within the core itself, something further burns, but she can’t spare the energy to understand. All she can do is summon up the tattered remains of her will and fasten on to the tiny pressurepoint of easing cold.

She holds tight, and cradles herself around it.

Out in the real world, Alex holds a nanite-glowing hand steady against the side of Lin-May’s shoulder, and kisses her back on the forehead. Hundreds of thousands of simultaneous scenarios are playing out across the existent world.

Hundreds of thousands.

A statistical aberration.

If Alex succeeds in trying not to loathe herself, what left of Lin-May doesn’t know.

 

4 |Cairo

The fourth time they kiss, the world is falling apart. And no one notices. No one seems to care.

They must care, Lin-May knows. There are things they must care about, the other people. The walk, they talk, they think. They spend so much energy. They must be spending it on something.

Mina Ameer is expelled from Tarsus. Why? Who knows. A vague feeling. Magnified, multiplied. _We don’t like you. But-!_ _We don’t like you._

Lin-May holds her while she cries.

Lin-May knows what happens next.

She’s seen it before.

After all, it’s difficult to love yourself when majority rules.

They find the girl’s body a few days later and Lin-May tries, as she usually does, to get the fuck out of the city. She needs space, space to remember how to fucking breathe. It’s harder to accomplish than it ever was before the plagues were cured. She needs to get away, but there’s no real travel anymore.

Why bother?

What’s there to see?

What’s there to see and feel and do when you have the sense of it, right there in your head, 24/7?

It’s out of control and no one cares.

No one even says it’s name anymore.

Why bother?

What’s there to say?

She’s more sad than shocked when she hears a helicopter overhead later that night. She goes to the derelict helipad more out of necessity than desire. No one else will.

She’s more sad than shocked when Alex tumbles out of the busted up heli, deep soaked black circles under her eyes, aggressive ragged scars patterning out along veins that are vivid with violet light.

She stumbles. Her voice is even less stable.

_Where is she?_

Lin-May shakes her head. _Her mother is of one of You._

For the lucky few, grief is distributed, these days.

Sometimes, Lin-May tries to claim the bodies before they can be destroyed, to do something for them, some last rite, some last marker, some last consideration of care, some _anything,_ but it rarely works. Bodies are not as relevant as they once were. The people she lives alongside hardly even see hers anymore.

Alex makes it another few steps towards the ladder heading into the Medina before she breaks down.

Lin-May holds her while she cries, with an implacable fear that’s the kind of core-cold she hasn’t felt in a long time.

See, she knows what happens next.

She’s seen it before.

Alex doesn’t say anything while she calms herself down. Eventually, she removes herself from Lin-May’s arms, and stumbles her way back to Ava Johnson.

Lin-May would say something, but there’s no plea in the world that matters anymore. Nothing she can say. It’s all been heard before. Especially by Them.

Alex is half in the helicopter before Lin-May has to do something all the same.

“Denton,” she calls, because that, too, is a name no one says anymore.

The light in Alex’s arms and eyes flares.

She drops back down to the landing pad. She stalks back over, with all the grace and power of someone who is lighting up the whole of the space with the number of nanoaugs she has.

_The fuck did you call me?_ Alex spits out, the tension so tight in her voice that Lin-May begins to understand how it is the woman in front of her remains functioning, after all that’s happened.

“Alex Denton,” Lin-May repeats. Alex is hardly taller than Lin-May, but she has the kind of presence Lin-May vaguely remembers from the people who walked in and out of her life when she was younger.

Except, unlike them, Alex is actually illuminating the things around her.

And not only with the glow from her augmentations, either.

Alex balls her hands up tightly, skin drawing thin over knuckles that stand out in distinct relief. She locks her jaw.

“I-,” she hisses, talking through her teeth.

Lin-May reaches up without thinking and pulls her into a kiss. She doesn’t think about it. They don’t think. Why should she? And caution is a relic of a bygone age.

Alex’s anger doesn’t melt away. Thank god for that, it’s still there. It’s there in the way she pulls Lin-May back to the helicopter, there in the way she kisses with her eyes open, blinking away suppressed tears. There in the way she shoves Lin-May’s fumbling, slow hands – how long has it been – away from the complicated tangle of combat gear and belts and pants, there in the ways she hoists Lin-May up onto the flooring of the helicopter and pushes her flat against the bare metal and climbs on top of her and yanks her skirt up above her hips.

For the first time in a long time, Lin-May’s glad no one else is around.

Alex fucks her remorselessly. She kisses the base of Lin-May’s throat, almost nipping at the skin, while she runs a thumb from Lin-May's cunt to her clit, skin gliding easily, because Lin-May can already feel herself getting wet. Alex kisses Lin-May’s throat one more time, this time truly catching a slight bit of skin in between her teeth, before she puts both hands on the sides of Lin-May’s waist, nudges her further away from the copter’s edge, and then proceeds to bury her head in between Lin-May’s legs.

Alex’s nanites pulse in time with her heartbeat. Or maybe in time with Lin-May’s. Or maybe neither, maybe, maybe...it’s hard for Lin-May to pay attention to the visual world with Alex’s hands under her underwear, with Alex’s warm, sighed breaths on her exposed skin, with the pliant touch of the cartilage in Alex’s nose teasing out a groan from her lips.

It’s even harder to pay attention once Alex’s tongue slips quickly inside her.

She forgets about anger, her hips bucking as Alex fucks her, remorselessly.

She forgets about anger completely until she bites back a moan, and rides out the orgasm with Alex’s lips still on her.

Lin-May is reaching for Alex before the heat is even close to being done echoing through her body.

In the back of her mind, she wishes she was more shocked than sad when Alex moves away sharply pushes her back.

Lin-May can’t actually say the other woman is crying, because while there are tears, they are not being acknowledged in any way.

Only the painfully bright lights in Alex’s pupils are realized.

_Don’t ever,_ Alex says, with cold-core fury, _call me that again._

The anger, Lin-May re-remembers, is there, and she thinks if she could just get at it, she could survive this world.

_Stay,_ she says.

The fury in Alex lashes so hard Lin-May has to stop looking at her. It’s too bright. It’s too much. It’s the wrong thing to say, and Lin-May loves that fact.

_Then_ _take me with you._

_They lied to me too, after all._

Alex laughs.

Alex laughs, in this hellscape of an apocalypse. Pauses, and laughs, and shifts so she can look out across the derelict landing pad and the even more derelict city beyond it.

_Funny thing is,_ Alex says, _I don’t honestly think they knew._

Not that it matters one way or the other.

After all, when the helicopter leaves Cairo behind, Lin-May is on it, too.

 

5 | Trier

Alex doesn’t touch her again for a long time.

There’s a cost to anger, Lin-May realizes. Something everyone said, but never meant. How could they? Lin-May can see what it really looks like. She learns.

It looks like this:

A young woman in Ulaanbaatar, standing numb in the street with her hands held out in front of her, a box of plates dropped on the ground and broken with shards arrayed across the sidewalk. Her arms and hands are shaking as she looks at them, as she looks at the thin cuts all over them, tiny scarred healed things, as much as self-inflicted injuries can be healed while the self that’s doing it is only half present.

Two grandparents in Lisbon, standing with their feet in the sand, wondering why they recognize each other.

A pre-schooler in Trier who’s climbed into a tree and refuses to come down and only climbs higher, screaming and panicked, whenever anyone comes after him.

Alex rubs a thumb over the worst of the woman’s scars, stands between the grandparents and picks up their hands, waits until the kid makes a mistake and falls and catches him easily. She holds them, and drags the Helios from their minds, and shudders with the impact of it while Lin-May follows up with shots and procedures stolen from god only knew how many dead Templars.

They stop being other people, these people. The woman looks around her world confused and dazed, and moves to pick up the pieces of her plates as if that’s what matters, anymore. But it does, and it’s beautiful. The grandparents turn, and don’t see Alex anymore, just one another, forgetting ten billion names minus two. The child calms down, runs back to the arms of two parents who look at him, distraught, not saying a word because they aren’t used to needing to, not with him. The child looks up, and recognizes that they don’t seem to recognize him, and he starts to cry again.

It’s not all victories.

A few go back, Lin-May knows. It’s those days where Alex halts, wherever she is, doubling over herself, wrecked apart by the faraway resurgence of some doubled identity.

It’s not all victories.

But it is all loss.

Lin-May knows it, knows that even if Alex does, she’ll ignore the fact. She, after all, can’t see how she’s changing. She, after all, can’t see that the more everyone else becomes themselves, the less she does.

Every piece Alex takes from them, every piece she captures and holds so they don’t have to, every dulled blunt bladed motion she takes eradicates another little piece of her.

Losing herself by day.

_You can’t be everyone, Alex,_ Lin-May finally protests, that last evening.

Alex had only smiled, with pure violet eeking through her veins.

_Who?_ she says.

Lin-May’s heart freezes, then Alex shakes her head.

_Sorry,_ she says. _My mind was elsewhere._

She comes back, though. She always comes back. Even if it takes a bit longer every time.

_This has to stop, doesn’t it?_ she asks wryly, fully Alex again, when Lin-May doesn’t say anything.

_I can’t be everyone,_ she adds, in the silence.

_No,_ Lin-May agrees quietly, with the odd notion that she doesn’t understand exactly what it is they are agreeing on.

They’re asleep that night, or early morning, when Alex kisses her for the fifth time.

Lin-May is barely awake.

She doesn’t even remember it until she wakes up in the morning proper, white sunlight on her skin instead of discordant purple.

_Alex?_ Lin-May calls, searching with increasing franticness. _Alex!_

She’s gone, of course.

Lin-May tells herself that Alex always comes back, though. She always comes back. Even if it takes longer every time.

 

* * *

 

1 | Liberty

The world ends again, as it is wont to do. Lin-May is out walking on the street, stuck back in a place she once would have died to get to, cold and tired and worn out from the effort of waking up. But the winter air reminds her of things she ought not to forget.

She is walking, and something flickers through the immaterial world like the illusion that a candle goes out all at once, rather than in an ever-rapid wave.

She is walking, and everyone else on the streets stops dead. And she remains as the only one still moving.

While everyone stops dead, though, they _aren’t_ dead. They’re alive. She watches them for a precious moment. Stammering. Slowly taking halting steps and reaching for one another. Remembering how to breathe on their own.

They start walking.

She breaks out into a run _._

Travel, she knows, is about to explode.

She doesn’t know where she’s going. Doesn’t know how she’s going to get there. In the end, it takes months and months of work, of reaching out, of research and connecting and digging out every last shard of a trail out of what’s left of what’s left of what’s left of the world.

Alex’s nanites are fission stark light, pulsing silently, but she isn’t breathing anymore. She’s alive nonetheless, and looking at her be alive without living, Lin-May wonders how much of Alex's life ever _wasn’t_ just routine. Her body is curled up, limp, at the base of a pile of rubble in the center of the achingly silent building.

Lin-May steps over corpses and tries to ignore what she knows that means.

Alex’s skin is scarred, in every way possible. There are more rippled scaled lines along her body than skin itself, and through each broken indentation runs the thinnest line of light. Yet there are so many. Over and over, thousands and millions of small threads linking and twining and lilting through her. It’s as if she’s burning alive from the inside out, silently, silently. As if the thing that is her is only, and has only ever been, an empty container for something beyond them both.

For something like the rage and fury and sadness of a billion people and billions more behind them.

Like the twisted helix shreds of truth doubled around lies.

_Alex,_ Lin-May says, and touches her shoulder lightly.

Alex’s eyes open calmly, though they are blank but for ultraviolet.

_Alex?_ Lin-May asks, though they are blank.

_Alex._ she demands.

_Alex!_ she pleads.

“ _Denton!”_ she shouts, and shakes Alex, hard.

Nothing happens.

And nothing happens.

And nothing happens.

“What have you done?” Lin-May finally asks, voice catching on the words. She pulls Alex closer, cradles her and traces the worst of the corded lightlines braiding over and across her jawline.

_What have you done,_ she repeats, and brushes a scrap of dust and pebbled ruins off Alex’s cheek. She hesitates before placing her lips carefully on the knot where two tracked jagged light scars collide, but she does it anyway.

A last hope, maybe.

It does nothing, of course.

Maybe it never had.


End file.
